Visual
Studio
is a powerful package, and is used by developers across
the world, because of its flexibility and power. One of its
greatest things, is its extendablity. Loads of people use Visual
Studio day-in day-out, but very rarely take the take to learn how to
write custom macros, custom plugins, or even a custom debugger.

For example, as I'll show, if you work with python a lot, and you might
have noticed that Visual Studio doesn't colour code your words, or even
predict words with intellisense, which puts you off using it for python
files. But visual studio lets you add your own custom colour
coding, you can adding buttons that will convert code, add dialogs,
windows, anything you can think of, theres an option for it to make
your development work easier.
Most of the new tutorials here will be for Visual Studio 2005/2008 and
2010, even though some of the older code will run on earlier versions
(2003).

Packages -
Hardcore SDK

Packages are the low level stuff which lets you do the hardcore stuff
in visual studio. If you want to write your own debugger, then you can
write a custom package for it. Or if you can a custom colour
coder with intellisense, then a package is the way to go. To work
with packages though, you need the Visual Studio SDK, which you can
download from Microsoft for free.

If you need to add a find dialog, or right click on a word and bring
up a list of options, bring up a dialog to process something, or just
run another package and print out the errors in the error window in
visual studio, you can do all that with an Addin. Addins are
simple and easy to get started with, and give you lots of power with
little overhead.

o Smiley Button
o Busy with a Dialog!
o ..

Programs and Demos

I'm always writing little addins/packages to make my life a little
easier, so I thought I'd share them below.